ABSTRACT
Viewing semantic arguments as participants in an event and focusing on the event type properties of the alternants, lexical-syntactic flexibility becomes a phenomenon of easily grasped dimensions. The many different kinds and forms of alternations fall in one of only three classes: alternations with an atelic-telic event type-shift, alternations characterized by causativization and alternations in which the alternants present different foci on the same event. Moreover, how many arguments are mapped and onto which syntactic positions depends to a great extent on event type. There are two correlations between event type on the one hand, and verb frame on the other. A telic event type requires the projection of an argument in direct object position; a causative event type requires the projection of arguments in both subject and direct object position. The question why a verb appears in more than one frame is thus related to the fact that it can present the same event from various eventsemantic angles. The question why it appears in a particular set of frames reduces to the mapping requirements of particular event-semantic perspectives as expressed by these two generalizations. The conclusion that frame alternations must be analyzed in terms of the relations between event types and verb frames implies that a theory of the lexicon-syntax interface must be framed in those terms as well (see Chapter 4).
